People

Team members are staff, students and long-term visitors (3 months or more) of the group.

Current team members

Sebastian Funk

Seb’s main interest is in using computational models in combination with infectious disease data in order to better understand and predict infectious disease dynamics. This includes developing and evaluating methods for short-term forecasting, testing the predictive value of additional data sources on pathogen biology and human behaviour, and doing all of this in order to inform public health decision making. He strongly believes that science should done openly and that there is great value in developing methods as tools that can be used by others.

Alexis Robert

NA

Ciara McCarthy

Ciara is a Research Fellow working on evaluating methods for infectious disease forecasting. She is interested in the development and application of tools for infectious disease modelling in an outbreak context.

Emil Iftekhar

Emil Iftekhar is a guest at EpiForecasts and a researcher and epi-modeller at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI, German national public health institute) and the World Health Organization Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. He works on evaluating the process from epi-modelling to decisions and policies. He has a background in physics.

James M. Azam

James’ main interests lie in developing and applying mathematical and statistical modelling to quantify the impact of outbreak response strategies in order to inform decision-making. He also develops and contributes to open-source tools and pipelines for reproducible outbreak response analytics.

Katharine Sherratt

Kath is a research fellow at LSHTM and spends most of her time working on the European Hubs for Forecasting and Scenario modelling of COVID-19. Her background is in epidemiology and she has a strong interest in collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to public health research.

Liza Hadley

Liza is a final-year PhD student exploring the role of infectious disease modelling in outbreak response. She is interested in how mathematical modelling is used by governments, health organisations and other decision-makers during a health crisis, and whether the process can be improved. Our current study aims to interview modellers and decision-makers in every major country that has used modelling for Covid-19 response, drawing together experiences and lessons learned in time for the next crisis. Liza is a joint Cambridge-LSHTM PhD student.

Manuel Stapper

Manuel’s research interests are the spatio-temporal modelling and forecasting of infectious disease dynamics and development of open-source software.

Nikos Bosse

Nikos is a PhD student working on infectious disease forecasting and is interested in all things related to forecasting. As part of his work he developed crowdforecastr to compare human forecasts of COVID-19 against model-based predictions. He also has a strong interest in forecast evaluation and proper scoring rules and developed the scoringutils package.

Sam Abbott

Sam’s main interests are developing, evaluating, and applying methods for improving our understanding of infectious disease dynamics in real-time. See his personal website for more detail on his current research and interests.

Toshiaki Asakura

Toshiaki is a PhD student working on household study data and is interested in applying modelling techniques to support decision-making, particularly in the context of real-time response. He has also an interest in in combining various sources of data (such as genome data) for better insights.

William Green

William’s work focusses on developing and parameterising network models of sexually associated infections in MSM, with applications to mpox. He previously completed a PhD at Imperial College London where he focussed on modelling within- and between- host viral dynamics of SARS-CoV-2.

Former team members

Akira Endo · Friederike Becker · Hannah Choi · Hugo Gruson · James Munday · Joel Hellewell · Joseph Palmer · Robin Thompson · Sophie Meakin